Running audio and video equipment at the same time can be a lot of work. Sometimes it’s easy to miss simple things on one device or the other because your focus is divided between two sets of equipment. An example of this is ambient room noise from fans or air-conditioning systems. The noise might not be a problem for a continuous shot but it may be very difficult over the course of multiple shots to get the sound to match up. Some shots might have the hum of air and others may not.

A simple and easy way to remove background noise from a clip is to use a noise gate. This is basically a method used to reject audio above or below a set threshold. It can be very handy if you are trying to remove background noise from a given audio track. Set the lower threshold to something above the noise floor and below the lowest need audio level. Anything below that threshold will be removed from the audio clip, that way whenever someone isn’t speaking into the microphone you have silence.

Adobe hides the noise gate feature under the label “dynamics” while FCP editors can find the feature under the label “AUDynamicsProcessor”. If you don’t use either of these programs and your editing software doesn’t have this feature you can export your audio and perform the same task in free programs like Audacity. For a step by step guide in Audacity you might want to take a look at this.

I plan to start adding m0re audio tutorials to my list of things to do, so if there is anything you’d like to see covered just let me know. Now that the studio is almost finished I can start release videos on a much more regular schedule. I’ll keep you posted.

Reader's Comments

Hey DeeJay,
Having picked up the Tascam Dr07 MKII recently, this is really helpful! And having just received Premiere CS6, one thing that drives me crazy is that I can’t see the wave lengths on the audio in the timeline. How do you activate it?

I’ve seen a few people actually take the lens apart, wipe down the focusing parts, and put them back together with some success. Or you could use one of the leverage type focusing units that apply more force then most of the gear type options.

I think you missed two important controls on your gate: attack and release. These settings relate to the amount of time that the gate takes to fade in and fade out the input. To short an attack will make the gate “grab” the sound, to long an attack will cut the first bit off. Using a slightly longer release will also help sometimes.

That’s true with music but with speech the cadence makes attack and release less of an issue. If you set the gate level low enough, you wont notice the cut in audio in speech, but it will be very noticeable in music.